The Color of Night

by Madison Smartt Bell (Vintage; $15)

It’s September of 2001, and for Mae, a card dealer at a Nevada casino, the attack on the World Trade Center provokes not horror but a sort of exultation—and, in the newsreel footage, brings the image of a former lover, bloody and overwrought. Mae watches clips of the attack obsessively, and they arouse in her memories of a torturous relationship with her brother and a late-sixties sojourn in a drug-fuelled commune, led by a charismatic Charles Manson type, where sex, love, and sadistic violence were inextricably linked. In his acknowledgments, Bell, the author of a widely admired trilogy of novels set during the Haitian revolution, writes that this book is “the most vicious and appalling story ever to pass through my hand to the page, so inevitably some people will hate it.” The litany of cruelties is indeed shocking, but the novel lacks the psychological insight required to provoke a truly visceral response. ♦